VR on the cheap: a review of the Vuzix iWear VR920 video eyewear

A low-cost, high-quality video headset has been a dream for a long time, and …

Where the ocean meets the sky, I'll be sailing

The first game tested was Portal, simply because Portal is awesome, and if you gave me anything from a new mouse to a new set of speakers, the first thing I would play is Portal. Again, text is easy to read, the graphics look pretty solid through the headset, and the view is large enough that falling into a portal only to be spit out of another with your view shifting and your velocity increasing was enough to make me feel ill. But in a good way.

I tried a few more games, like Quake 3 and a few of the classic titles from the id Steam package and was impressed that even without stereoscopic 3D enabled, things did have a nice 3D look to them. Having a screen for each eye does give everything a sense of depth that a monitor lacks.

Then I decided to play the game they thought would best show off the hardware: Flight Simulator X. I installed the beast (15GB!?!?) and set up the flight stick so I could get the full effect. At the moment there are only a few games that support head tracking, such as World of WarCraft, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Second Life, and a few others. If they haven't written the driver for the game yet, you're out of luck. A list of only 10 games is unfortunate for a $400 piece of hardware. Vuzix says that there is an SDK available for developers, but it's an open question how many people will use it.

I calibrate the headset by holding it in front of me after opening the calibration software, and then I twist it in every direction. When I'm happy, I lock the settings in. This is kind of a touchy process, and I had to practice a few times before I got to the point where it worked well with any regularity. Still, it takes seconds. I opened up Flight Simulator X after making some changes to the folders in the Program Files to get the headset to work properly, and the game wanted me to change my desktop resolution to 1024x768 to run correctly. No problem, although the glasses had some problems scaling the text; I found myself squinting trying to figure out what plane and mission I wanted to try.

Then the game started.

I've picked a lot of nits, and at this stage I've been wrestling with drivers and trying to put a shirt over my head to block out incoming light. I'm kind of cranky that way. All of that annoyance was gone, as I found myself inside the cockpit. Like, inside it. I look down and see the instrument panel. I look left and see out the window. I look up and see the rivets holding the metal plates of the plane together. I took off, looked out the right window over the empty seat, and banked hard so I could see the ocean beneath me. Amazing. The sense of flight and actually being there is almost overwhelming.

Imagine looking around the cockpit in real time. Very cool stuff

The motion-tracking isn't perfect; it's helpful to remember to turn your head with moderately-paced, smooth motions. Also, if you didn't do a good job at calibration, you'll know it instantly. But once you get it to work the effect is very, very nice. This is the first time I've ever used a consumer-level headset that delivered actual, working virtual reality at a sub-$500 price point. If I were a hardcore flight sim player, I could see picking up the VR920 just for this.

Summing it up

There are many "gotchas" with the VR920. Stereoscopic 3D is an impossibility if you have Vista or a modern video card, and Vuzix even warns about head tracking in 64-bit versions of Windows. This one reason why I keep a dual-boot system for testing hardware, but not everyone does that, and this is advertised as a consumer product. The attached cables and built-in audio are questionable design choices, although the microphone built into the glasses works well.

The head-tracking only works with 10 games at the moment, and to get the head-tracking to work you'll have to dump some of Vuzix's code into the games as well as master the calibration tool; this isn't exactly plug-and-play. On the games it does work with though, the visual quality is more than adequate, and the head-tracking is so much fun it's almost unbelievable. If you have Windows XP, some patience, and a love of flight sims, this could be worth the purchase.

While the VR920 isn't an unconditional success, it is the closest anyone has ever gotten to a consumer-level, "gotta have" virtual reality headset. I can't wait to see what Vuzix comes up with next; it seems like the company is close to doing what I considered impossible before starting this review.

For $400 this product may not be a must-have for anyone but flight simulation fanatics, but it's a significant improvement over other products on the market.